Project

Discipline

Conversation Analysis ; Interactional Linguistics; cross-linguistic comparison; co-construction of utterances; epistemics; spoken German; spoken Czech; spoken French

Lead
Während eines Gesprächs kann der unvollständige Redebeitrag eines Sprechers durch einen anderen Sprecher vervollständigt werden. Dieses gemeinsame Formulieren von Äußerungen tritt typischerweise bei Wortfindungsschwierigkeiten auf, ist aber auch beim gemeinsamen Erzählen oder Erklären zu beobachten. Obwohl diese sogenannten Ko-Konstruktionen in typologisch unterschiedlichen Sprachen beobachtet wurden, wurden ihre Formenvielfalt und ihre sozialen Funktionen bisher nur unzureichend beschrieben.
Lay summary
Inhalt und Ziel des Forschungsprojekts Anhand von Videoaufnahmen und Transkriptionen alltäglicher Gespräche in drei Sprachen soll erforscht werden, in welcher Ausprägung gemeinsame Formulierungsaktivitäten vorkommen und welche sozialen Aufgaben diese erfüllen. Das Projekt soll erstens ergründen, welche Arten von Ko-Konstruktionen in den drei Zielsprachen (Deutsch, Französisch und Tschechisch) existieren und inwieweit grammatische Eigenschaften der jeweiligen Sprache (z.B. Wortstellung) unterschiedliche Formen von Vervollständigungen ermöglichen. Zweitens wird untersucht, ob gemeinsames Formulieren eine grundsätzlich kooperative Handlung ist und wie dieses alltagssprachliche Phänomen von Sprechern dazu genutzt wird, Argumentationspositionen und Wissensstände untereinander zu verhandeln. Wissenschaftlicher und gesellschaftlicher Kontext Einerseits trägt das Projekt zur Entwicklung eines qualitativ-(sprach)vergleichenden Ansatzes sowie zu einer detaillierten Beschreibung gesprochener Sprache und angewandter grammatischer Strukturen bei. Andererseits erlaubt es, Gespräche nicht nur als reinen Informationsaustausch, sondern vor allem als soziale Interaktion zu verstehen, in der gemeinsame Formulierungsaktivitäten systematisch zum Einsatz kommen. Eine genaue Unterscheidung von kooperativem und kompetitivem Sprachverhalten kann zu einem besseren Verständnis von privaten und beruflichen Gesprächssituationen führen.

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Last update: 31.10.2013

Active participation

Self-organised

This project aims to investigate co-construction as a recurrent phenomenon in spoken interaction from a cross-linguistic perspective. “Co-construction” designs the completion of a first speaker’s utterance by a second speaker, so that two participants contribute to a single syntactic or utterance unit. Within the framework of Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974; Schegloff 2007) and the closely related domain of Interactional Linguistics (Ochs, Schegloff & Thompson 1996; Selting & Couper-Kuhlen 2000), I wish to provide a systematic description of co-construction in three different languages: Czech, French, and German. Based on video recorded naturally occurring interactions in ordinary settings and detailed transcriptions of these data, my project will not only contribute to a thorough, cross-linguistic description of a phenomenon specific to spoken language, but also tackle a practice that can throw light on diverse aspects of the relationship between language specific grammatical resources and interactional conduct. I thus aim to study both grammatical and social aspects of co-construction.My project should first investigate the grammatical resources used for co-construction in Czech, French, and German. The conversation analytical literature on co-construction represents the starting point for my research (Sacks 1992), especially the work by Lerner (1991, 1996), who made the first systematic description of this phenomenon in spoken English. Most research in this domain focuses on syntactic aspects (Lerner 1991, 1996; Ono & Thompson 1995), more specifically, on how grammatical structures enable participants to independently complete a more or less incomplete utterance of a previous speaker. Research on spoken Japanese and Finnish has shown that grammatical features of a given language can lead to specific forms of joint utterance completion (Hayashi 2003a; Helasvuo 2004). In this respect, a first aim of my project is to describe the diversity of co-construction in three languages, for which little (German and French) or no descriptions (Czech) of this phenomenon exist. A second objective is to emphasise language specific forms of co-construction, i.e., forms linked to syntactic, morphological, or other grammatical specificities of each language. The comparative approach is inspired by current research in Conversation Analysis and Interactional Linguistics, which are increasingly tackling the possibilities of a qualitative comparative approach (Sidnell 2009). However, explicit comparative analyses of co-constructions are almost inexistent (for one example, see Lerner & Takagi 1999), therefore the basic idea that different grammatical resources in different languages will lead to possibly different kinds of co-constructional practices has hardly been explored (Karkkäinen, Sorjonen & Helasvuo 2007). On a broader level, this project shall also contribute to general reflections on possible comparative approaches within Conversation Analysis (cf. Haakana, Laakso & Lindström 2009).In addition to the grammatically oriented part of my research, I aspire to investigate co-construction as a social phenomenon. As shown by initial descriptions of this phenomenon in English (Lerner 1991, 1996), co-construction is not simply or exclusively linked to grammatical schemes, but also to local actional features. This explains why co-construction frequently occurs during word search activities (Goodwin & Goodwin 1986; Hayashi 2003b), in joint storytelling or explanation sequences (Hayashi 2003a; Lerner & Takagi 1999). Although co-construction is frequently described as being “collaborative” (e.g. Bolden 2003; Lerner 2004; Szczepek 2000a), this does not imply that every co-participant completion is formatted or treated as such (Mondada 1999; Szczepek 2000b). I therefore plan to investigate how to precisely distinguish between cooperative and competitive forms of co-construction. Following Conversation Analysis, I will not base my analysis on external formal criteria, but instead I will consider how co-construction is locally treated by the participants themselves (“emic” point of view, see Levinson 1983). I plan to analyse co-construction within three-part sequences: a) the more or less incomplete utterance of a first speaker; b) its completion by a second participant; and c) the evaluation of this completion by the first speaker. Although conversation analytical research on co-construction has recognised this sequential organisation, these three parts have not been equally described as research has mainly focused on how grammatical resources enable co-construction. In particular, the third sequential position in co-constructional sequences, the receipt slot, has received little analytical attention (for exceptions see Gülich 1986; Lerner 2004), though this position can convey essential information on the perceived problematic or unproblematic nature of the completion. This point can be usefully related to a burning issue in Conversation Analysis: the negotiation of epistemic positions in interaction (Heritage 2012a; Stivers, Mondada & Steensig (Eds.) 2011). Existing studies show that the participant’s negotiation of epistemic dimensions cannot only be displayed through lexical choices, but also through grammatical structures (word order, mode, tense, cf. Clift 2012; Heritage 2012b). As a matter of fact, co-construction can be related to several issues concerning epistemic negotiation in interaction: participant roles and participation framework (Goodwin & Goodwin 2004), gradual forms of acceptance or refusal of co-participant completion (Lerner 2004), cooperative vs. competitive conduct in interaction (Jacoby & Ochs 1995), as well as change-of-state tokens and response particles in various languages (Golato & Betz 2008; Heritage 1984a; Imo 2007, Sorjonen 2001). As epistemic dimensions have been mainly investigated in English data (Heritage & Raymond 2005, Raymond & Heritage 2006), my research on three different languages can sensibly contribute to this emerging topic in Conversation Analysis.